These tricks will get you excited about many of the mundane-sounding Command Prompt commands like telnet, tree, or robocopy—okay, robocopy sounds pretty cool. Some of these Command Prompt tricks are special features or fun uses for the Command Prompt itself, while others are just neat or relatively unknown things you can do with certain CMD commands. If you haven’t actually executed a command, you can just backspace and erase what you’ve typed, but if you’ve already executed it, then you can do a Ctrl+C to stop it. It isn’t a magic wand, and it can’t undo things that aren’t undoable, like a partially complete format command. However, for things like the dir command that seem to go on forever or questions you’re asked at the prompt that you don’t know the answer to, the abort command is an excellent Command Prompt trick to know. One way to manage this info dump is to execute the command in a special way so whatever information is generated is shown to you one page, or one line, at a time. Just type the command, and then follow it with the pipe character and then the more command. For example, executing the below command will generate the thousands of lines of results that you expect from the dir command, but the more command will pause each page of results with – More – at the bottom of the page, indicating that the command is not done running. Just press the spacebar to advance by page, or press Enter to advance one line at a time. You can always right-click any Command Prompt shortcut and choose Run as administrator, but creating a shortcut to do the same thing can be a huge time saver if you’re a frequent Command Prompt power user. To complete this trick, just create a Command Prompt shortcut on the desktop, enter the shortcut’s properties and then select the Run as administrator box, located in the Advanced button on the Shortcut tab.
F1: Pastes the last executed command (character by character)F2: Pastes the last executed command (up to the entered character)F3: Pastes the last executed commandF4: Deletes current prompt text up to the entered characterF5: Pastes recently executed commands (does not cycle)F6: Pastes ^Z to the promptF7: Displays a selectable list of previously executed commandsF8: Pastes recently executed commands (cycles)F9: Asks for the number of the command from the F7 list to paste
Instead of C:>, you can set the prompt to any text you want, have it include the time, the current drive, the Windows version number (like in this example image), you name it. One useful example is prompt $m$p$g, which will show the full path of a mapped drive, alongside the drive letter. You can always execute prompt alone, without options, to return it to its sometimes boring default. However, any command can be suffixed with the /? option, usually called the help switch in Command Prompt, to display detailed information about the command’s syntax and often times even some examples. The help switch may not be the coolest Command Prompt trick you’ve ever heard of, but it’s hard to disagree that it’s one of the more useful. Neither the help command nor the help switch offers much in the way of explaining how to interpret the syntax. These little characters let you redirect the output of a command to a text file, giving you a saved version of whatever data the command produced in the Command Prompt window. For example, let’s say you’re about to post a computer problem to an online forum and you want to provide really accurate information about your computer. An easy way to do that would be to use the systeminfo command with a redirection operator. For example, you might execute systeminfo > c:\mycomputerinfo.txt to save the information provided by the systeminfo command to that file. You could then attach the file to your forum post. Execute tree from any directory to see the folder structure under that directory. With so much information created with this command, it’s probably a good idea to export the results to a file so you can actually look through it. For example, let’s say your name is Maria Smith, and you want to express your ownership of the Command Prompt. Execute this and the title bar will change immediately: The change won’t stick, so the next time you open Command Prompt, the title bar will be back to normal. The title command is usually used to help give a custom appearance in script files and batch files—not that titling it with your name isn’t a good idea! However, what if you do just want to copy a short section of text to the clipboard? It’s not too hard, but it’s not very intuitive either: That’s the menu-based method, but surprisingly, you can also use the regular Ctrl+C shortcut, too. Now you can paste that information anywhere, just like you paste other text. In Windows, open the folder you’d like to start working from. When you’re there, hold down Shift while you right-click anywhere in the folder. After the menu pops up, you’ll notice an entry that’s not usually there: Open in Terminal (Windows 11) or Open command window here. Select that, and you’ll start a new instance of the command line, ready and waiting at the right location. If you’re a Command Prompt power user, you’ll immediately recognize the value in this little trick. For example, in Windows 11 and 10, the path to the Accessories group in the Start Menu is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories. Who wants to type that all in manually? We don’t. Just open the folder in Explorer. Once there, drag the folder or file to the Command Prompt window and let go. Like magic, the full path is inserted, saving you a considerable amount of typing depending on the length and complexity of the path name. The easiest way to shut down a computer remotely is to execute shutdown /i from the Command Prompt to open the Remote Shutdown Dialog, shown above. Just enter the name of the remote computer (which you can get by running the hostname command on the other PC), choose what you want to do (restart or shutdown), select some other options, and then select OK. So whether you’re brushing up on your command skills or just scaring a family member, this Command Prompt trick is a fun one. You can also shut down or restart another computer strictly from the Command Prompt with the shutdown command, without using the Remote Shutdown Dialog. Just execute the following, obviously replacing the source and destination folders with whatever you’d like to back up and where it should go. The robocopy command with these options functions identically to an incremental backup software tool, keeping both locations in sync. You don’t have this command if you’re using Windows XP or earlier. However, you do have the xcopy command, which can be used to do something very similar: No matter which command you choose to use, just create a batch file containing the command and schedule it to run in Task Scheduler, and you’ll have your own custom-made backup solution. Everything you’d want to know about your network connection is available somewhere in the Control Panel in Windows, but it’s much easier to find, and much better organized, in the results from the ipconfig command. Execute this command in Command Prompt: What displays on-screen next is everything important about your network connection: your IP address, hostname, DHCP server, DNS information, and much, much more. There is, and it’s called the subst command. Just execute the command followed by the path of the folder you wish to appear as a drive. For example, let’s say you want your C:\Windows\Fonts folder to appear as the Q: drive. Just execute this command and you’re set: This Command Prompt trick makes accessing a particular location from the Command Prompt much easier and the folder will appear as a drive next to all your real hard drives. The up and down arrow keys cycle through the commands you’ve entered, and the right arrow automatically enters, character by character, the last command you executed. This might not sound that interesting, but there are several situations where the arrow keys become huge time savers. Consider this example: You’ve typed out 75 characters of a command and then try to execute it, only to find that you forgot to add an option at the very end. No problem, just press the up arrow and the entire command is automatically entered in the Command Prompt window, ready for you to edit to make it work. To use tab completion, enter the command and then the portion of the path that you do know, if at all. Then press the Tab key over and over to cycle through all the available possibilities. For example, let’s say you want to change directories to some folder in the Windows directory, but you’re not sure what it’s named. Type cd c:\windows\ and then press Tab until you see the folder you’re looking for. The results cycle in order, or you can use Shift+Tab to step through the results in reverse. You know how your smartphone’s texting app automatically guesses what it is you want to type next? Tab completion in Command Prompt is sort of like that—only better. First, let’s use the nslookup command to find the IP address of lifewire.com. Just execute nslookup lifewire.com and view the result. Don’t confuse any private IP addresses that also show up in the nslookup results alongside the public IP address of lifewire.com, which is what IP address we’re after. Now let’s try using the ping command to find it. Execute ping lifewire.com and then look at the IP address between the brackets in the first line shown. Don’t worry if the ping command “times out” during execution; all we needed here was the IP address. You can use the same procedure with any website or any hostname on your local network. Just right-click on the Command Prompt title bar and select Properties. On the Options tab, in the Edit Options section, check the QuickEdit Mode box and then select OK. Enabling QuickEdit Mode is like having Mark enabled all the time, so selecting text to copy is really easy. As a bonus, this also enables a simple way to paste into the Command Prompt: just right click once and whatever you have in the clipboard is pasted in the Command Prompt window. Normally, pasting involves right-clicking and selecting Paste, so this is still a bit different than you’re used to. Just open Command Prompt and execute this: The movie will start immediately. Check out the tip below if this doesn’t work. True, this isn’t a terribly productive use of the Command Prompt, nor is it really a trick of the Command Prompt or any command, but it sure is fun! We can’t imagine the work that went into this homage to the sci-fi masterpiece.
